Mobile electronic devices, including mobile wireless communication devices such as cellular telephones, smartphones, handheld PDAs, and the like, are often capable of determining their current location. One or more technologies may be used for location determination, including satellite-based positioning systems such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), positioning systems based on terrestrial wireless signals such as cell tower signals or wireless network signals, or other techniques, such as deadreckoning, inertial navigation, or the like. Device location may be used in providing location-based services, for navigation, or for other purposes.
Device location history may be automatically collected over time and analyzed to extract information. Some applications perform analysis of the location history, for example to determine locations where the mobile device appears to stay for a period of time. Furthermore, some applications have been proposed which attempt to automatically assign semantic meaningful tags to certain locations. See, for example, “The Whereabouts Diary,” G. Catelli, M. Mamei and A. Rosi, Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Location- and Context-Awareness, Vol. 4718, 2007. However, such approaches may be complex, error-prone and time and resource intensive.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus for generating and using location information that is not subject to one or more limitations of the prior art.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.